Textualism, The Laws of War, and More: This Week in the Book Pages

In "Reading Law," they argue forcefully for a
textualist approach—for interpreting legal documents, especially the
Constitution, by focusing on written words in their original meaning. Along the
way, the authors debunk the claims of the non-textualists, who, they say, seek
to deconstruct the language, imposing on it a content that was never expressed.
Such an effort, they note, defeats the whole purpose of communication and
substitutes the reader's ideas for those of the writer.

You can read the full review here. You can also find a review of the book at
Slate, here.

"The Chinatown War," Scott Zesch's portrait of Los Angeles in the early 1870s, foreshadows the economic paradox of many later American cities, combining the lure of a vibrant economy with the threat of competition divided along class and racial lines.Zesch, who previously has written about racial conflict in the Old West, looks for evidence of white attitudes towards Chinese by surveying the earliest local newspaper articles about Chinese residents in L.A. After finding a mostly neutral or even positive tone in the earliest newspaper coverage, Zesch detects an abrupt change, perhaps reflecting the increasingly virulent anti-Chinese sentiment in San Francisco.

In The Nation, Jackson Lears reviewsPromise and Peril: America at the Dawn of the Global Age(Harvard University Press) by Christopher McKnight Nichols. According to Lears, "Nichols has accomplished a major feat, demonstrating that isolationism was a far richer and more complex intellectual tradition than its critics have ever imagined—one that still speaks to our own time, freshening the stale formulas of the Washington consensus and allowing us to reimagine the role of the United States in the world."